14 Rainbow Foods to Try

We’ve been told that we should eat a variety of brightly-colored foods for maximum nutrition. Maybe that’s why we're so drawn to rainbow-colored dishes, even if they're created with food coloring. Lucky for us, there are more treats that come in rainbow colors than ever before. Here are just a few of them.

1. CHEESECAKE

Tian Kee & Co, a retro-themed cafe in Singapore, made the beautiful Rainbow Yogurt Cheesecake you see above. They serve several kinds of cheesecake, but the rainbow has become their go-to dessert to snack on while sipping your latte.

A photo posted by feedfeed, by Julie Resnick (@thefeedfeed) on Jul 5, 2016 at 5:52am PDT

Make a rainbow on your toast with a cream cheese spread made multicolored by adding different natural ingredients. Adeline Waugh at Vibrant & Pure Wellness has the recipe, in which she uses beet juice, turmeric, chlorophyll drops, spirulina powder, and blueberry powder to create the different colors. Perfect for anyone who wants to become a fine artist at breakfast time.

Skilled baristas who decorate lattes with artful designs have a new weapon in their arsenal: rainbow cream! Mason Salisbury of Sambalatte in Las Vegas did the cups you see here, and there's plenty more colorful foam here that came from.

4. SMOOTHIE

PopSugar shared this recipe for a Rainbow Smoothie, which consists of layers of yogurt, honey, and fruit, with a different fruit combination for each color. The layers stay separate if you freeze each one as you prepare the next (and use caution when spooning in each new layer of the rainbow).

5. GRILLED CHEESE

A photo posted by hkfoodiexblogger (@hkfoodiexblogger) on Oct 27, 2015 at 1:29am PDT

We may be primed to think of rainbow-colored food as sweet, thanks to ice cream and sorbet, but the colors can be added to savory foods as well. Take, for example, the grilled cheese sandwiches at the Hong Kong restaurant Kala Toast, which are laden with rainbow colored cheese. The colors represent different flavors: the blue is lavender, the green is basil, the red is tomato, and the yellow is a combination of gourmet cheeses.

The Bagel Store in Brooklyn caused quite a sensation when they debuted their Rainbow Bagels in 2015. The bakery made 800 of the bagels every day, and every day, the run sold out entirely. The demand was so great that they closed one location temporarily earlier this year in order to regroup and ramp up their production process. They will ship bagels to you, but there is a large waiting list, so if you're hungry for custom-colored bagels for a special occasion, you better order early.

7. WAFFLES

This video from Kochen Online shows you the technique for making rainbow waffles with food dyes, homemade batter, and plastic baggies to control how much batter you drop into the waffle iron. There’s a recipe at their YouTube page, but you can do it with any batter you'd like.

A photo posted by A.J. (@theindigokitchen) on May 12, 2016 at 8:27am PDT

Food artists are now routinely showing off their rainbow sushi, made with colorful natural ingredients surrounded by rice dyed in bright colors (you can see a gallery of different creations here). The Rainbow Unicorn Sushi pictured above was created by The Indigo Kitchen, and they even reveal how they pulled it off at their website.

10. PASTA

Even pasta can be made in rainbow colors, and it only takes a couple of extra minutes of prep time. Ali Ebright of Gimme Some Oven dyes cooked pasta in plastic bags for just a minute, then rinses before combining them to create pasta that looks like it came out of a Play-Doh machine. The full set of instructions is at Tablespoon, and Ebright has an archive of rainbow recipes, many of which use naturally bright foods.

11. BREAD

Get your kids, or anyone, excited about sandwiches and French toast with five colors in your bread! Stephanie of Girl Versus Dough posted this recipe for her Rainbow Swirl Bread: a loaf of homemade yeast bread, divided into five portions, colored, and then swirled back together tie-dye style before baking.

12. CAKE

Making a cake with rainbow layers is as simple as making a layer cake. You just divide your batter into six equal parts and add the appropriate food coloring to each. (Don’t make thick layers, since you’re going to stack six of them.) Of course, you’ll need quite a bit of frosting to hold your rainbow cake together. If you want a recipe, try one from a baker who uses a startling amount of buttercream frosting to make her Super Epic Rainbow Cake.

A rainbow striped drink is a tricky project, but it gets a lot easier when you use layered fruit for your colors. Ali at Gimme Some Oven created this beautiful Rainbow Sangria drink with grapes, blackberries, blueberries, kiwi fruit, fresh pineapple, oranges and strawberries. That’s a lot of fruit for a glass of wine, but after you drink it down, you can simply pour more wine over the fruit.

14. JELLO

No surprise here: Rainbow Jell-o is incredibly easy to make. All is takes is six colors of Jell-o, room in the refrigerator, and the patience to let each color set before adding the next one. Be sure to make enough to allow for family members who might sneak a taste before you have the chance to put the rainbow together!